They’re all frightfully keen, those magnificent men in their flying machines

It’s a busy old time for virtual pilots of World War II(ish) crates with World of Warplanes hitting official release this week and War Thunder ramping up for its launch on the PlayStation 4 and the addition of ground forces.

I popped back in to the World of Warplanes open beta last month when they added British planes, and patched it up for release a couple of days ago. The controls certainly seem to have improved from earlier beta versions so WoWP is perfectly fine for a bit of flying-type fun, but not enough to displace War Thunder as my dogfighter of choice. Still, I’ve got a bit of premium time left from tokens earned during the beta, so I’ll at least try to use that for a bit of a leg-up towards a Spitfire. I won’t be going all out to be First to the Top, though, that way madness lies. I didn’t think it was a particularly good idea when Blizzard started handing out server first achievements, and that was without an incentive like ten years of premium account time.

As a canny marketing stunt/completely coincidental bit of timing/evil underhanded plot, Gaijin are also dangling a carrot to encourage War Thunder players to jump through a few in-game hoops, offering players the chance of participating in the closed beta test for ground forces by completing daily challenges over the next three weeks. The first challenge, to destroy 60 ground targets, was pretty straightforward. The second, to shoot down 35 opponents, was rather trickier as you had to be flying one of five specific aircraft (one per country), which made Arcade battles a little unusual as many players quit after losing their challenge aircraft rather than respawning. Today’s was better, shoot down 30 fighters, sorted out with a few trips back to low level furballs. I won’t be going mad to try and complete every challenge, but it’s quite fun mixing up the type of aircraft you fly and way you play to at least have a crack at different challenges.

The announcement also offered a hint at dates, “The testing itself is currently scheduled to start before December 4th”, so it looks like tanks might be coming in early 2014. I had a brief peek at the forums to see if there might be any more hints, but after seven pages of frothing excitement, bitter complaints and animated GIFs I had to close the browser window for fear of developing photosensitive epilepsy.

More positively on the forums there’s a rather splendid British Tech Tree Project, a collaborative effort that’s produced an impressive looking possible tree. Aircraft suggestions usually range from “You know that plane, yeah? The one with the guns and this and that, yeah? That would be all amazeballs they should totally put that in the game, you know what I’m saying?” to “Gaijin must implement pastes Wikipedia list of all military aircraft 1934 – 1952“, but this group have taken the time to sift through the possibilities, assemble cohesively themed branches with suitable ranking and produce a graphical version of the tree in keeping with the in-game interface. Most impressive.

The KiasaBot knows all! (And I might’ve been on a WWII aviation binge when adding words to the spam list…)

It’s not so much the general prizes for hitting Tier V+ that’s madness, more the big prize being for the first to Tier X, I dread to think what sort of Pro Plus and Red Bull fuelled binge was needed for that…